Why does hardware (phones, GPU’s, Processors) only get a little bit better annually, while never making any solid leaps ahead of competition?
In: 7
Because it’s an annual release cycle. Leaps ahead of competition happens as a result of years of research. If you release intermediate products every year, the leaps are broken up into smaller chunks. Plus your competition becomes very aware of what you’re building and because it’s an annual release cycle it usually doesn’t take them much longer than a year to catch up.
Plus technology is at a point where we’re beyond noticing significant changes at the hardware level that at one time would have been revolutionary. Hardware used to double in performance every other year and it was very noticeable when your base performance was lower. Now it’s so fast that we simply don’t notice what once would have been revolutionary advancements and take it for granted.
If you want an example, look at current EUV technology and sub-7nm chips. Current top of the line chips would be economically infeasible without EUV. EUV took 4 decades to become a reality and it required researchers to effectively build the machines from scratch because of how different it is from previous technology. For consumers, it’s just inevitable and the expected march of technology.
Another are the mRNA base vaccines. It took scientists about 5 decades to go from the first attempts at a mRNA vaccine to where we are today with the COVID vaccines and the first widespread use of the technology.
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